Vadim Belman has published the video of their second Rakudo Core Development class, giving an introduction on many aspects of Rakudo and NQP internals. Clocking in at more than 2.5 hours, it should help anybody wanting to contribute to the Rakudo core significantly!

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov published two blog posts in the past week, both introducing new Raku modules:

• DateTime::Grammar
• Data::Cryptocurrencies

Andrew’s Corner

Andrew Shitov solved a Weekly Challenge in a dialogue with ChatGPT.

Steve’s Corner

Steve Roe expressed their joy with the Data::Dump::Tree module.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #204 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Spectesting is a minefield

New Pull Requests

• Update GitHub CI pipelines to track branch renames and OS deprecations
• Add --gen-moar/--with-moar to build command
• Make log and sqrt handle negative values mathematically correct
• Eradicate knowledge of COMPOSE phaser
• Make & sigil defaults and types correct
• Switch Supply.zip to a watermark approach
• Fix rare deadlocks during supply setup

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a Unicode class with information about the current version of Unicode supported (instead of just a $?UNICODE-VERSION constant), and added a :run named argument to the debugging-aid .AST function to immediately execute the AST.
• Will Coleda added support for Complex.sign in v6.e.
• Christian Bartolomäus allowed for more heap memory when compiling on the JVM backend.
• Vadim Belman fixed a serialization issue with Version objects.
• In RakuAST news: ab5tract implemented support for subset and a helper class for installing objects in packages. Stefan Seifert added support for indirect method syntax, augmenting packages, calls on multi-part names and parsing of indirect lookups in ternaries. Elizabeth Mattijsen implemented support for use fatal and fixed issues with initialization of our variables.
• And many more smaller fixes and tweaks!
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 129/141 (make test +1) and 682/1355 (make spectest +17, which is more than halfway!).

Questions about Raku

• Command not found by sashoalm.
• Can Declarator Blocks be used on variable declarations? by Jim Bollinger.
• What explains this difference in behaviour? by zeekar.
• How to return a Hash/Raku object from native call? by Rawley Fowler.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• So much in the core by Mark Gardner.
• Promotion at FOSDEM by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Different from Japanese tea pottery by Mark Gardner.
• Manipulate the AST while being compiled by Olivier Mengué
• Does it allow doesn’t? by Piers Cawley.
• The more I play by Paul Buetow.
• The Raku Conference on Mastodon! by The Raku Conference.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• Supporting? by Steve Roe.

Comments

• On when and proceed by Ralph Mellor.
• Sum of numbers of arbitrary length by Jo King.
• Supporting both paradigms by Ralph Mellor.
• Limited-precision rational numbers by jwmerrill.
• It’s multi-paradigm! by Local-Emu2992.

New Raku Modules

• Chart::EasyGnuplot “A simple modules to make simple plots, without having to think about Gnuplot internals” by Air4x.
• Slang::Otherwise “Slang to add ‘otherwise’ block to ‘for’ loops” by 0racle.
• Data::Cryptocurrencies “Functions for cryptocurrency data retrieval” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• DateTime::Grammar, Text::CodeProcessing, Markdown::Grammar by Anton Antonov.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• LibXML by David Warring.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• SparrowCI, SparrowCI-SandBox by Alexey Melezhik.
• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• Monad-Result, Distribution::Builder::Cmake by Rawley Fowler.
• Collection, Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• Spreadsheet::XLSX by Jonathan Worthington.
• Inline::Scheme::Gambit by iynehz.
• zef by Nick Logan.

Winding down

A week with a lot of RakuAST developments and some nice new modules and blog posts! Please keep the people in Ukraine in mind who are still fighting the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

Please keep staying safe, keep staying healthy, and keep up the good work!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!